Social worker tells of forced adoptions

A former social worker has told how she was instructed to actively encourage young unmarried mothers to give up their babies for adoption at a Sydney hospital in the 1970s.

The woman, who wishes to be known only as "Jan", was a trainee social worker at Sydney's Royal Hospital For Women when it was run by the Benevolent Society in 1972.

She has told ABC1's Four Corners she has always felt awful about her part in pressuring young unmarried women 40 years ago.

"Basically my job was to shut them up, stop them crying, get them to realise that giving up their baby was the best thing that they could do and get on with it," she said.

Jan says it was made clear to her by her superiors that adoption was the only message to be delivered to unmarried mothers.

"I was one of the people who was involved with telling the girls that if they kept their baby they were being selfish. They were being selfish to the baby and selfish to the adopting parents who really wanted to have a child," she said.

Precise figures are not known, but it has been estimated that up one quarter of a million women gave their children up for adoption in Australia between the 1920s and 1980s.

Many of those women now claim they were given no choice but to surrender their babies for adoption in the face of family and social pressure.

Some claim they were drugged and restrained before giving adoption consents.

A Senate inquiry is due to report on Wednesday after 12 months of gathering evidence from hundreds of relinquishing mothers across Australia.

Some mothers claim the signatures on their adoption consents were forged while others allege that they were wrongly told their babies were dead, only to be contacted by grown children years later.

Margaret Freeman gave birth at Newcastle's Mater Hospital in 1975 when she was 17. Her son was taken away instantly and when she returned to the hospital to retrieve him she was told he was already adopted out.

"It wasn't like giving birth, it was just like an instant loss. You know for months beforehand you feel him moving and kicking and then he's not there, and not in your arms he's just gone," she said.

Monica Jones told Four Corners she was in her early 20s when her child was taken.

"It was a form of punishment. We were naughty girls and we didn't deserve to have our babies. And that’s the way I have lived since I was 22," she said.

"I have lived with that shame that I was a naughty girl and had to be punished.

"To go through your life and never know what it is like to see the child you gave birth to is a terrible thing."